Inbound Marketing and the Power of Intent

At the first NLP conference I attended some years back the speaker described humans as:

“Goal Making Machines”

From the time we get up in morning until we go to bed at night we are constantly setting ourselves goals, both consciously and sub consciously. For example, the simple process of getting to work involves a series of goals, getting out of bed at a specific time, taking my many tablets for stomach & migraine problems, eating breakfast, feeding our pug etc. These are examples of sub conscious goals, in that I don’t even think about them, my brain is wired to meet these goals, they are habits.

Running a marathon in the new year would involve a series of conscious goals I make (until they hopefully become habits), I will get up at 8am for a jog, I will take that evening spin class on a Tuesday, I will stop eating all those lovely chocolate rice cakes. If a marketer in (the fitness sector) knew of my intention to run a marathon and the series of goals I had set myself, they would be able to market to me pretty effectively. Gym leaflets through the door, advertising boards of the latest nike runners on my way to work, cold calling about the latest offer on that summer boot camp. I would still not be very responsive as we are becoming less susceptible to this kind of outbound marketing.

This is the beauty of inbound marketing, we can use things like keyword research, persona mapping, analytics, a/b testing to figure out the intent of our prospects at each point of our marketing funnel (what goal are they trying to fulfil). We can adapt our inbound marketing strategy to ensure we are fulfilling that intent across the purchase journey

The Power of Who

There is no doubt your prospects wear a number of different hats at various stages of their purchase journey.

When thinking about your personas, you are not just trying to figure out who they are, you are trying to figure out what is their intent across your purchase cycle. This way you can start to build your inbound marketing strategy to fulfil this.

Need  more information about Persona Modelling?

- The SEO Path to Becoming a Great Funnel Owner
- Content Marketing – Think Campaigns Not Just Links, Your Guide to TOFU
- WhiteBoard Friday – Creating Marketing Personas
- Psychographic Targeting Unhinged! The Zen Of “Whole Customer” Persona Modeling
- Psychographics Deconstructed: What We Look Like to Facebook Marketers
- Free Template: The Marketer’s Guide to Creating Buyer Personas

For example, let’s say I am developing an inbound marketing strategy for a website called SneakerFiend.com (domain was still available when I last checked ) who sell the latest sneakers & hightops. I might develop a number of personas to represent my potential buyers (the below is not a full persona, just a small part of it for illustration purposes).

I would then look to map out his intent across each stage of my funnel:

There is never going to be an entirely accurate picture of the purchase journey. The only accurate funnel you will have in the case above is the check out process as it’s set in stone (converting customers). You will have prospects who start their journey at lots of different points, some might start right at the end (usually searching for brand terms) and some might start right at the start (who may find you through social media, your own blog, informational keywords), but jump around the different stages (more of this under The Content Marketing Part).

By mapping out this process we start to attain some knowledge about the intent of our persona across the purchase journey, what goals are they trying to fulfil. In the attention stage, their goal could simply be to pass some time during their lunch break by looking at cool stuff. This is a sub conscious goal. They are not actively thinking about it. This is why social media ads struggle in terms of conversion, they are trying to fulfil an intent (I must buy [insert product]) that most people don’t have when they are on those platforms. Further down the funnel they have conscious goals with the intent of purchasing a particular brand of sneakers. This is why Google’s PPC platform has been so successful, you are advertising to someone who has the intent to purchase a product you stock.

The Inbound Marketing Mix

Inbound Marketing allows you to be part of that purchase journey, even when the intent of your prospect isn’t to purchase any of your products. It’s extremely powerful in those early stages of Attention and Attraction where their intent could be to solve a particular issue, kill some time looking at cool stuff or to watch interesting videos

How the Inbound Marketing mix works across the funnel really depends on your business model. At each stage there is probably a lot of overlap between tactics such as SEO, Content Marketing, Social & Landing Page Optimisation.

I wanted to just touch upon SEO & Content.

The SEO Part

This isn’t a post about the role of an SEO, if you want to read an excellent article on that, I recommend this one – What The Heck is SEO? A Rebuttal, so I am not listing out all responsibilities an SEO has across the funnel. We are discussing how an SEO can work to fulfil a users intent across the funnel, which usually means (for me), keyword research & content mapping.

A very simplistic version of this may look like:

As mentioned, this is a simplistic version. The blog could have multiple topics including sneakers themselves. There will also be keywords like “cool sneakers” that you could argue belong to Attention or Attraction. Trying to establish the intent behind keywords isn’t easy until you actually have some analytical data to back it up (that’s why PPC is often described as a great testing tool for organic).

For any keywords where the intent isn’t obvious, you can simple look at the SERP’s themselves to establish what Google feels is the intent behind a particular keyword.

Intent is also important in determining who will link to your site. Most keyword research is focused on the persona you’re trying to attract to your site. (those people who will buy your products) These aren’t necessarily the same people who will link to it. For a little more about this, I am going to bring in link building super star James Agate founder of  SkyrocketSEO to discuss how he might build a profile of link targets for each campaign .

James Agate

Let’s get the cliché out of the way “build it and they will may come link”, in the cold harsh real world, additional thought needs to go into understanding where the potential links are going to come from.

In the same way that optimising a page doesn’t have to mean ramming paragraphs with keywords, you can encourage links to solid content by balancing these the needs and wants of buyers and linkers. In most markets, these aren’t the same people.

The aim is to hit that sweet-spot where it is content that customers love and find useful BUT that also has some kind of mechanism and validity when it comes to earning links which with a little help can become passive.

A glossary or genuinely good knowledgebase are two great examples of this. If you let the sales team write these things then your knowledgebase will likely be filled up with little more than entries like “Why are our prices sooo much cheaper than the competition?” With a little tweaking this piece could become a valid comparison that taps into the search traffic for “brand vs brand” and makes a good piece to link to for any bloggers in the market who are looking for a piece to reference in their latest post. More often than not it boils down to making content less commercial and salesy and looking at ways to offer value to the person with the power and inclination to link to you.

I covered this and finding other underserved queries in your market in a post I did last year.

In terms of designing content from scratch we’ll ensure that the people with the power to link are included right at the concept stage. We typically visually map out the prospective markets we could beg for links outreach to as well as the markets that intersect the topic we are covering and so may have an interest or need for our piece.

In practical terms this will mean you have an opportunity map that spans a number of potential areas to secure links from – this is good news.

It doesn’t mean you need to necessarily proactively go after links for every single page you are creating because in reality (particularly with large-scale content projects) this isn’t practical or cost-effective BUT if you’ve identified who might need and want to link to what you are writing about then you can better brief a writer and your editor can ensure this group of people are catered for. This might include things like “reading level”, language used, format, level of savvy (could they embed a quote with some code copy and paste?) etc.

As Kieran said earlier in this post, a quick bit of Googling and some time spent researching what is out there at the moment can pay huge dividends when it comes to understanding intent (including what Google believes user intent to be) and how well served you think that user currently is.

To give you a real-life example, we work with a client that operates in the financial industry. A competitor of theirs (in link terms more than sales) dominates the SERPs at the moment for all kinds of informational queries with their glossary & knowledgebase so they earn all of the links although we’re slowly starting to turn the tables for the following reasons…

They failed to understand that the audience of the bloggers are typically complete newbies, in the past they got the links because the people with the power to link had no good alternative and were either too lazy or didn’t feel inclined to produce it themselves. The glossary entries do match the intent of the user but it was more “That’ll do” than “This is exactly the explanation I needed”.

We swoop in and produce content that is not only useful to our client’s customers (remember; the linkers are often trying to serve the same type of people ultimately as you are so that sweet spot I talked about earlier really isn’t all that uncommon) but is also highly-linkable because it provides a more targeted explanation of the concept meaning the bloggers are happier to reference it.

That wouldn’t have been possible if we had just replicated what appeared to be a successful strategy by the incumbent, competing site. We spotted a gap in the market (specific type of content), we fulfilled it and we’re slowly starting to see the payoff (links and a greater influencer mindshare). Basic business principles once again ring true.

The Content Marketing Part

The content marketing part overlaps with the SEO keyword research, in that you can build simple content maps to keywords provided by the SEO, which I gave an example of in this post. But not all content needs to have a keyword tied to it. Will Reynolds sums it up pretty well in this twitter conversation.

@searchbrat TRUE!!! Very true.Most content should be tied to an audience who might be interested in it.

— wilreynolds (@wilreynolds) November 27, 2012

Content should be tied to an audience who have an interest in it (it’s fulfilling their intent). This is particularly true at the Attention stage where it’s not always easy to find keywords to map against. For example (to carry on with the sneaker theme), two great examples of building attention with content are:

Nike Fuel:
- Intent to get Fit 

Karmaloop TV
- Intent: Listen to the latest urban music (that you can tie back to fashion)

Mapping your content to interest stages is important for both B2C and B2B companies, as you don’t want to be developing overly promotional content if your prospects intent is to just listen to music or watch videos from their favourite artists.

How you measure the success of your content marketing at each stage will also differ. Content in the attention stage is used to build up your audience. Maybe you are measuring email sign ups, downloads of a particular piece of content, how many visitors from your blog click onto the core site, Twitter followers, Facebook friends and so on.

Producing remarkable content through each stage helps you get in front of those people who are not actively looking for you. There is a great piece about the purchase journey and intent in this slideshare from Velocity Partners (starts at Slide 30). Although this is for B2C companies, the theory can be applied to most purchase journeys.

For a little more on this, I am going to hand you over to Doug Kessler, the wizard of Content and Co-Founder of Velocity Partners, to describe the importance of establishing intent when mapping out your content marketing efforts.

Doug Kessler

“A lot of marketers think their job is done when they map content to specific personas and buying stages. While doing this is essential (and still rare), you need to take it to the next step by asking two questions:

1. “What does this persona need to know at this buying stage?”
What questions are they asking at this point? What issues are shaping the way they think about their options?

2. “What do I need to tell them at this stage?”
What information will make them want to go to the next stage? What will make them more likely to choose your products when they’re ready?

Kieran notes the way search terms can signal intent. In the same way, the content you produce can go a long way to helping you establish intent at each stage.

If you’ve produced content around specific issues, the simple fact that someone has chosen that content tells you the things they’re thinking about.  But if you haven’t done that, you’re depriving yourself of an important signal source.”

Understanding the intent and goals of your target audience through your purchase journey will definitely help when planning out your entire Inbound Marketing strategy, Content, SEO, Social, Landing Pages etc, it won’t always be accurate, but it certainly helps to keep it in mind.

If you are interested in diving deeper into things like intent and general neuromarketing – I just picked up this book Brainfluence, which is written by Roger Dooley.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. An Inbound Marketing Case Study
2. 5 Best Resources to get Started with Inbound Marketing
3. 4 Tips for Improving your Paid Advertising with a great Inbound Marketing Strategy

I recently participated in a post titled – Tips when hiring an SEO Consultant where 10 people gave recommendations on what you should look for when hiring an SEO consultant/agency. I think for a lot of companies (in particular SMBs), this is a really difficult task. It’s probably how I feel when looking for a garage to get my car fixed. I am totally clueless in all things mechanical. I have no desire to improve my knowledge in this area, I don’t have time. I just want to pay someone to fix my car. Obviously the decision to hire someone to market your website is a lot more important than getting your car fixed, but it seemed like a good analogy

It’s interesting most SEO’s would never recommend actually searching for “SEO” related keyphrases to help make your choice (no one in the article mentioned the SERPs). In most other industries, an SEO would recommend optimising against the search funnel (I showed a mock up of one in this post). An example of this funnel for “SEO” (the below search terms are straight out of my head and not mapped to actual volume) may look like:

The reality is how many people find an SEO consultant/agency may not involve a search for “SEO” related keyphrases at all. It will look more like:

The SERPs for “SEO” related keyphrases are not trust worthy …

This is a bit of a sweeping statement, but I think it’s true in a lot of cases (and I am going to show it). A lot of the companies ranking for “SEO” related keyphrases are not the type of companies I would assign budget to or recommend to anyone else. They offer low quality link schemes for small budgets. In most cases this is because the type of leads generated by “SEO” related keywords are SMBs who have small budgets and so are happy to buy into the theory you can get a “Silver Links Package” for a couple of hundred bucks per month.

Ireland as an Example

This is not an outing post. I am not going to mention what SEO keywords the results are for, or mention any company names. There is nothing overly complex in the following, I simply used OSE and LinkDetective to categorise those links from  companies ranking top for “SEO” keywords you would use to research companies in Google.ie.

The Most Common Tactics Used

Looking at 10,000 links for those SEO companies ranking in top spots for “SEO” related keyphrases, we see the biggest category for links is DEAD. All websites will have a number of dead links. Companies using low quality link building tactics will have a higher number of dead links. There were a number of companies ranking well in Google.ie with more than 60% of their links marked dead.

Unknown is the second most popular category (along with Footer). Usually when using LinkDetective this could be a good sign as the links are not easily categorised and so don’t fit into some of those categories which indicate a low quality link profile. But in the case of “SEO” related keywords in Google.ie, this just means lots more low quality links:

Forum Sig Links (sentence removed so people can’t find companies link profiles being used)

Blog Networks 

Lots More Links in Client Footers

The most popular method of building links for top ranking SEO companies in Google.ie is adding links into client footers. Although this was joint second (23%). If I added on all the links that were classified as Unknown, that actually belonged to this category, it would definitely be top. My personal opinion is Google should exclude these links. It’s also a tactic that cannot be scaled for clients.

All of the other tactics appeared to be quite low because the top 3 where so dominant. If we took out DEAD and Unknown, most link profiles are made up of really low quality tactics, adding links to client footers, posting/signatures on Forums, links in social profiles (made famous by Angela’s backlinks), blog comment spam, articles across low quality directories.

These are the companies Google.ie is returning for “SEO” related keywords. Most of them are faceless and totally untrustworthy, judging by their own link profiles. Some even offer those standard SEO packages that make you want to puke

Coming back to what got me thinking about this post. I certainly wouldn’t recommend the Google SERPs to anyone looking for an SEO company (if you are not going past the first page). That to me is an odd statement, coming from someone who is so passionate about SEO (even though it’s not my full time role anymore). As most people suggested in the article I referenced at the start of this post, I would hire the person vs the company (for SMB’s). Look at their social profiles and seek out recommendations. The Google.ie SERPs are a total mess for “SEO” related keywords. I could start up a site tomorrow and have it ranking in no time at all copying the low quality tactics currently being used. That doesn’t mean I would actually know anything about proper SEO.

This isn’t a post bashing the SEO community in Ireland either. Like the UK, most of the top guys don’t look to the Irish SERPs for business. If you are in need of a top Irish SEO consultant, both RedCardinal and RedFly are world class.

Lastly, I am not competing in the Irish SERPs, so this isn’t me throwing my toys out the pram due to poor ranking In fact, this site is carrying a penalty (or was) due to a number of poor links I built when I first got into online 4 years ago. We all make mistakes !!!

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. An Inbound Marketing Case Study
2. Google Instant Preview & Deep Page Rankings = Better Leads
3. Is Social Media Killing your SEO Strategy

Content Marketing is not going to solve all your companies problems, in fact it may add to them.

“Everybody’s doing it, so I need to jump on that”

Content Marketing – Google Trends

In most online marketing channels, there are usually a small number of leaders who set trends and then a massive amount of people who follow suit. There is nothing wrong with this, it’s how online marketing tends to work. Transparency about what’s working is one of the best marketing tactics a leader can have to grow their own brand (this recent post by Justin Briggs is an excellent example - 33 Links & How to Get Them).

The problem is, as more people in your market segment follow suit, the more difficult this becomes. Simon Sinek uses the law of diffusion (in his excellent TedTalk) to describe the tipping point a brand needs to reach if they are to scale their business:

Think about this law in terms of different marketing channels. For example, there is no doubt it was a lot easier to grow a successful website on the back off a good SEO strategy a number of years back. For those in the early adopter stage, being one of the first to adopt an SEO strategy in their market would make it very difficult for a competitor to try catch them by following that same SEO strategy today.

Being First Counts …. A Lot

If you apply the same logic to Content Marketing, being first (or one of the first), to adopt a content strategy will result in a lot benefits for your business (if executed well). Those sites who are first will start to receive the love of Google and subscribers who may currently not be having their needs met. Being first also means the quality of your initial content doesn’t need to match the standards of those who will follow. This is summed up well by Mark Schaefer in his comment on Marcus Sheridan’s post – A Rant on Why I Disagree with Blogging & Content Marketing Experts:

the true key to content marketing success is to be first and to be overwhelming. Hurts to say that but it’s true. Quality does not necessarily matter. As you stated, your pool website won the Google battle because you were first and overwhelming, not necessarily any good. Furthermore, if a competitor came along that did provide better content, it probably wouldn;t matter because the game is already over due to sheer volume.

I would throw out Mashable as an example here (lots of people would say I am wrong). It would be very difficult to build a competitor to Mashable now. They have overwhelmed their space with quantity, in my opinion, at the expense of quality at times. Personally I am not sure who Mashable’s target audience is anymore.

So Quality Matters a Lot?

It would be stupid for anyone to say that quality doesn’t matter. In John Doherty’s post  - Do The Work, or Quit Blogging, he says”

 There is nothing worse, though, than someone who writes because they feel like they should write, and not because they want to write.

I don’t disagree with this, although there isn’t always a choice. A lot of SMB owners may not have the resources to hire an internal resource or subject matter expert, so just make a start themselves. In a lot of cases, just making a start in a market that hasn’t been over saturated with content may be good enough. Coming back to Marcus Sheridan, he made his name by massively growing his company RiverPools using inbound/content marketing tactics.

Marcus Sheridan – Riverpoolsandspas

In Marcus’s own words:

And speaking of “serving garbage on a plate,” just look at the first blog articles on my swimming pool site—River Pools. Without question, I served up garbage almost 3 times a week for the first few months of blogging.

In this case, quality may not have been key to the success Marcus had, it was more important to be an early adopter and iterate over time (getting better at producing quality). Would a competitor have that same type of success if they started on a similar path today, it’s highly doubtful they would.

Oh, I am Late, What can I do?

Not everyone can or will be an early adopter. New brands are created everyday in market segments that already have competitors who are killing it at content marketing. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make content marketing part of their strategy. It means they will need to work harder to make it work for their own brand. Examples of this may be:

- Do a lot of analysis to figure out what content gaps there may be in the market (that are currently not being fulfilled by a competitor)

- Do less content, but really focus on quality. Add unique elements that aren’t being used in competitors content

- If you have the budget, do something really creative to get you on people’s radars. This You vs. John Paulson campaign is a really great example

- Have a better product that allows you to create awesome customer success stories

- Of course, focusing in on a couple of high value keywords that will help spread the word about your content is also going to be a big contributing factor to a new brands success

In my opinion, if you are late to the party, it’s going to cost you more money to build a successful content marketing strategy. One of the best investments you can make is to hire a subject matter expert to write for your brand. Many of the competitors you are facing may be outsourcing this to SEO/Content agencies. In Paul Boags post (which rightly got slammed by a lot of SEOs) titled, The Inconvenient Truth About SEO, he made a couple of good points, including:

If you haven’t already, consider hiring an employee dedicated to creating content for your website.

I don’t agree with his next sentence on getting rid of your SEO agency to fund this, as he clearly has misunderstood what an SEO agency actually does, but I certainly agree with spending budget on internal content creators.

Content Marketing is not going to solve all your companies problems, in fact it may add to them.

Coming back to the first sentence, content marketing can be an extremely powerful tactic for any brand to adopt as part of a overall marketing strategy. But how easy it is to generate success with this is going to depend a lot on timing. You need to be really clear about what the goals of your content marketing strategy are, and if you have the resources to meet these. You need to be aware of what your competitors are already doing with content and how you can improve upon it. If you are in a market that is relatively thin on content, then just getting started may be enough for you to see positive results. If you are in a market that is already being well serviced, you will need to work a lot harder to stand out.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Where have I been ? SEO + Content and lots of Funnel
2. Traditional SEO vs Inbound Marketing – How to Scale your Business Fast
3. 4 Tips for Improving your Paid Advertising with a great Inbound Marketing Strategy

It’s a difficult balance to get right, having your head buried in a pile of work, actually doing it, and spending a little time on here writing about it. I made the decision this year not to take on any consulting work as I was flat out with my day time roles. I also made the decision to kill all my external affiliate sites. When I make a decision I can take quite drastic actions to implement it. I just a scrapped a site that cost me quite a bit to develop/design because I wanted to free up the space it was taking in my brain for other, better projects (I should of sold it). I recently sold my car for a fraction of it’s price for this same reason.

I do plan on resurrecting this site once I get it redesigned (Oh those “SEO” services hurt my eyes) as I enjoy writing and may look at a couple of projects, but until then, here is a quick collection of some of the content I’ve been producing in other places:

1. How to become a Great Funnel Owner

This is a post over on SEOMoz about how SEO’s can own more of the funnel. It includes some lovely lingo like TOFU and MOFU, plus an example of a new social metric you will hear lots more about – “Social CTR” – a true measure of influence.

2. Content Marketing – Think Campaigns, Not just Links – Your Guide to TOFU

Another post over on SEOMoz covering the fact content marketing is not just a link building tactic. It can benefit your whole top of funnel.

3. Multi Content Funnel Marketing – Developing the Right Strategy for your Funnel

A webinar I gave (this is the recording) on developing the right content for your funnel. I should note, this was a great example of why you just do a dry run of your webinar, totally overran the first part so had to rush the last section, doh

4. Content Marketing, Be Relevant, Targeted & Metrics Driven

My slidedeck from Funnel12 in London. A deck all about content marketing through the funnel, in particular, the importance of personas, influencers and metrics.

5. How to Create a #Winning Content Marketing Campaign

Six key steps to developing a winning content marketing campaign.

6. Creating a Local Influencer Strategy

How to create a local influencer strategy for your brand

7. Integrated Marketing – How SEOs can Own More of the Funnel

My deck from SearchMeetsSocial where I went through how and why SEOs should own more of the funnel

That’s some of the content I’ve had time to produce. I expect to be back up and running properly in January with a new design.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Is Content King Again for your SEO Strategy ?
2. SEO Deep Dive Analysis and How it can Damage your Campaign ? #SEO
3. Link Building – Get Ideas and Produce Linkable Content

Google really is on the war path. I started to work on a Google Penguin post but decided to wait a while and do a little more analysis as the onslaught of penguin posts was a little disorientating.

But the world of SEO is changing. Not just in terms of what tactics are best, but I feel Google is helping to shape a new mindset in SEO’s, that outing your competitors maybe the quickest way to get viable results.

This post will take a quick look at the story of iAcquire’s ban and 5 takeaways you can incorporate into your own SEO thinking.

The iAcquire Ban

iAcquire is a search agency that work for a number of big brands. They were covered on SEOBook a couple of years back due to their link diagnosis tool. In that post Aaron Wall makes the point that it’s probably not in your best interest to hand over link data to a company who themselves offer SEO services. In that post Aaron also made a connection between Text Link Ads and iAcquire, which suggests it’s no surprise iAcquire offer this kind of service to their clients.

iAcquire made the (pretty stupid) mistake of trying to purchase a link of a blogger, who blogs about social and marketing – Josh Davis. After 30 hours of research Josh spun up this post telling the world of what they were up to. It didn’t take long for that post to find it’s way to Matt Cutts:

and just like that your whole brand disappears into a sea of negativity

One blog posts, a couple of tweets to Matt Cutts, information digging by Google and your business is gone from the SERPs. This is the first time Google has apparently de-indexed an agency and it’s affiliates for selling links.

1. Getting Thrown under the Google Bus is Real Son !!

The world of SEO is now rife with outing. When Google started to de-index blog networks on mass, it sent requests to ask where the unnatural links were coming from. You can now stick up a blog post outing agencies, businesses or firms looking to purchase links and they could be out of the SERPs in no time at all.

For example, I have received two requests for paid links on one of my sites from two companies, both in the gambling sector. Examples below (I received 5 from the same person, who like iAcquire, kept asking for my attention).

First Email

Hi,

I am handling the advertising and promotions for XXX.
My client site would like to advertise on your site in a form of
in-content link advertising.

Maybe you can add my links on your next post?

Please let me know if this is possible and how much will it cost me for
this?

Best regards,
XXX

 Second Email

Hi,

I am hoping we can move forward with regards to our pending discussion on
my inquiry about advertising on [XX]
Please get back to me so we can further discuss the details.

Kind regards,
XXX

If I wanted my 5 minutes of fame, I could simply whip up a post and let it go. This may not be something I have an interest in, but believe me, there are a lot of people who want a bit of that spot light.

2. Take Responsibility for your Agency

It looks as if iAcquire were made to take the complete wrap for this. The client stated they had no knowledge of what iAcquire was doing. If they had zero knowledge, then perhaps whoever was managing them should be fired. The job of any internal resource is to manage their agencies. Look at what your agency is doing, ask for link reports, ask where the links came from and make sure there is something in the contract about financial repercussions if something like this happens. Agencies are less likely to bend the rules if they know there is a monetary penalty for getting caught out. Know what your link building agency is up to. Stories like this are great examples of why big brands need to hire internal resources with online knowledge.

3. Take Responsibility for your Client

If your client is happy for you to bend the rules and this has been agreed on up front, then it should be noted in your contract. When stories like this break, it looks far better for the agency if they can release a statement to say our client had agreed upon our strategy and was in full knowledge of what we were doing. Ok, so you may still get steam rolled by Google, but at least you don’t look like some type of dodgy back street link dealer.

4. Don’t do real stupid things

Can you believe people try to buy links of this site. I mean, there are a lot of stupid SEO consultants out there, don’t be one of them. In this case the wrong type of person was approached for a link. Look at the whois of the site you are approaching. Think, is this person going to through me under the Google bus. If you have any doubts about the results of your approach, go write a guest blog post instead.

5. Don’t believe the hype

The SMX conferences are great. Lots of amazing networking opportunities, lots of amazing best practice sessions on how you can beat competitors with white hat link building. Don’t believe everyone is using what they show at the events to drive results. In competitive keyword spaces, content marketing only get’s you so far. It’s really not that surprising that a large SEO agency is buying links.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. SEO’s are retards
2. Keyword Strategy: The Crucial Part of a Winning SEO Strategy #SEO #KeywordStrategy
3. Link Musings and Not Having Much to Say

I haven’t had a chance to blog much recently even though there are a LOT of things going on in the world of SEO. It’s pretty crazy right now. But this isn’t a proper blog post, I just wanted to flag a post I recently put live over on SEOMoz. It’s a detailed case study on a project I ran whilst at Salesforce and is based on a presentation I gave in London on the same topic. The post covers an inbound marketing case study and in particular:

- The new B2B Purchase Journey

- The notion of “Get Found”

- How to target specific content personas

- Promotion tactics we used for our inbound marketing project

- Our results

You can read the full post right here.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Why Cant SEOs Trust Their Own Results – an Irish Case Study
2. 4 Tips for Improving your Paid Advertising with a great Inbound Marketing Strategy
3. Inbound Marketing – A Happy Home for Some SEO’s ?

It appears Google is taking aim at the long list of blog networks that have sprung up over the past couple of years. Some of the biggest names like Build My Rank have even been shut down. Some of the other names to get hit (according to the IM world) include SEOLinkMonster, High PR Society, Unique Article Wizard, SEONitro, My Article Network, LinkVana and BackLink Canon. With Google also announcing a new “Too Much SEO” penalty, it appears the sky is falling for a lot of SEO folks. Here are 3 important things to note about what’s going on in the land of blog networks:

1. Public vs Private Blog Networks

I have seen a lot of posts that are pointing out private blog networks have been taken down by Google and there is little point in using these ever again. You should keep in mind a service like Build My Rank is not a private blog network, it’s very much a public network. Any network that allows the public to sign up and advertises itself to the masses is not very private. Building your own private link network means you don’t let other SEO/IM folk use it. You are best to just keep it to offline businesses who don’t care about link reports, but just care about results. Will this mean you stay clear of Google’s clutches? Well it really depends on how you build it.

2. The Warnings 

There are some really great insights into the type of warnings people are getting from Google about unnatural links over on this Google+ thread. Your typical message looks like this:

Something I found quite interesting is this thread over on the WarriorForum, which said:

Google replied and said: if you give us details of the SEO services you used this will increase your chance of having the penalty removed.

This would seem to flag whats ever happening is not algorithmic. These kind of blog networks are pretty easy to spot. Lot’s of content, not themed, plastered across random blogs, but my guess is Google are doing something semi manual where they push the button on something that runs out and slaps these networks. With over 700,000 unnatural link messages sent by Google in February alone, I doubt it’s a manual process. As David Harry pointed out on this thread, it’s probably that they always send these messages, but have now lowered the thresholds, or got better at finding these link patters.

3. The Fix

Unfortunately if you are caught up in this mess, there is no easy fix and there are some odd patterns as to how Google is dealing with sites that were using these blog networks. For one, there has been a lot of chatter around one particular link network that appears to have gotten all those who used it, into a spot of bother. SEOLinkMonster seems to be killing a lot of sites. This is a little odd. Most would have thought Google would just have devalued the links acquired from the networks. If they just penalised all sites who were found to have links from the networks, then how easy would it to be to run Negative SEO campaigns for your competitors. Simply dump your competitors into all these networks and watch them burn. But as Richard Hearne rightly points out on this thread:

Google is never going to be this dumb

It may be a case Google can look at a number of other factors including % of quality links vs % of crappy links, existing authority, trust etc when faced with a link profile that has clearly gone awry. This is what most SEO’s would like to believe as Negative SEO would be worse than people using blog networks for their own sites. However, I have seen a site who got the message above and received a penalty the following week, with only around 20 dodgy links, from thousands upon thousands of quality links. The site is a big brand, trusted, old and got a couple of crappy links over a 1 month period.

I would recommend anyone with this problem to get their link profile cleaned up and submit a re-inclusion request. A lot of people are recommending to say nothing as you don’t want to admit to your crime. Well, if you haven’t got a penalty yet, just the message, that could be good advice, but if your site has already been slapped down, you need to take your head out of the sand.

If you have got a penalty, you might want to take a quick read of this post from David Harry and also be sure to check out Tim’s post on his take on what’s going on.

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There is a lot of great discussion taking place at the moment around the term “inbound marketing” and what it entails. I have talked previously on inbound marketing vs traditional SEO and recently presented an inbound marketing case study in London based on results we had generated using these tactics. During the recent discussion on SEOMoz, Ian Lurie made a great comment (one that more people should of picked up on):

When presenting my own strategies, I have used the hubspot definitions and counted paid advertising as outbound marketing. But as Ian point’s out above “Good display, smart retargeting and quality paid search all fit”. It makes sense to me. For the purpose of this post I am going to share 5 tips from personal experience of how creating an inbound marketing strategy can improve your paid advertising. If that paid advertising is called outbound marketing, paid advertising or inbound marketing, it doesn’t really matter, what matters is results.

1. Persona Development

Personas are nothing new, they are used in lots of different ways, to make sure you build a product that people want, to make sure your site is designed with target users in mind, and in marketing we develop buyer personas so we can market to them more effectively. The success of your inbound marketing strategy will be driven by content, so one of the first things an inbound marketing strategy will supply you with is buyer personas (may be called content personas). These are usually developed using information from your analytics package, social media monitoring, customer interviews and surveys (both internal and external). These are invaluable when building a paid advertising strategy. You can start to develop a strategy of where your message needs to be and what it needs to say. Does your persona hang out on Facebook, Twitter, news publications, niche publications. What message is going to attract a click and what should your landing pages look like when you attain that click. Grabbing a copy of the personas from the inbound marketing folk will really help focus your paid advertising strategy.

2. Google Retargeting

Although the CTR of display ads seems to be falling YoY, the spend on display seems to be increasing, one thing for sure is the technology around display let’s you do a lot more with your budget now. A great inbound marketing strategy will let you vastly improve your Google retargeting program.

Image credit: AdRoll.com

Retargeting allows you to serve relevant ads to users who have previously visited your site. You can create retargeting lists and assign people to those lists dependent on what pages they have visited. As part of your inbound marketing strategy you should be creating some really great content. This will allow you to offer relevant content like eBooks or whitepapers to users via retargeting, in order to grab contact details so you can drive them into your nurture campaigns. For example:

User A -> Visits your sites and looks at mountain bikes

User A -> Leaves site

User A -> See’s ads for eBook on 10 best holiday locations to mountain bike in Europe

Advertising a piece of content over a product page (e.g. buy this), tends to work better with display. You will get a better CTR and can drive more people into your funnel. Although these people are less “sales ready”, if you have really strong nurture programs (driving them to Facebook, or Email sign up, places they can stay engaged), it could be of more benefit in the long run.

3. LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn advertising should be part of most B2B marketing strategies. The ads can appear in two locations:

image credit andreavahl.com

The great things about LinkedIn ads is the targeting options. You have already developed personas and content specifically for them. With LinkedIn ads you can target by industry and job function. This really allows you to create a focused campaign. Keep in mind this awesome guide for writing headlines from CopyBlogger and you should see great results. I have seen LinkedIn ads perform 300% better than a standard display ad.

4. Twitter Advertising

Twitter offers 3 types of advertising, promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts. At this point in time it’s REALLY expensive to advertise on Twitter (in terms of having to allocate a certain amount of budget per quarter), but it can be pretty effective.

Promoted tweets are a great way to support your inbound marketing strategy.

You can:

a. Promote to followers: You can promote tweets about your best content (I recommend things like eBooks were you are looking to capture a soft lead) and ensure the tweet appears top of your followers feeds when they login. A great way to get instant visibility.

b. People who are like your followers: Better still you can now target users who have similar characteristics to your followers. This is a pretty awesome enhancement from Twitter as it ensures your promoted tweet get’s extra visibility. It’s similar to how Google now let’s your target users who are similar to the retargeting lists you have built.

c. Keywords: Of course you can also target users based on keywords and ensure your tweet appears top for certain searches.

The great thing about sponsored tweets is you can use them to test what type of content resonates with your audience and use that feedback to produce more of what works.

I have also seen really impressive CTR rates from Twitter. A lot better than standard display, but then it’s difficult to a straight comparison as you are offering content, when display campaigns tend to try drive through to an offer.

Anything I have missed, or I should be adding to my paid advertising strategy, please let me know in the comments.

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3. What Should an SEO and Inbound Marketing Strategy Consist of in 2012

The following is a guest post from Jason Acidre who you should definitly follow via his blog Kaiserthesage and on twitter @jasonacidre

Content marketing has been one of the most powerful marketing strategies over the past years and an approach that’s somehow getting more favorable for search engines in seeding great from crap content over the web – proving it’s a force to be reckoned with.

Tom Critchlow once said that “Now is the time for content marketing” (he blogged about it last week). And I strongly agree, and I think most of us do, because it’s simply the best way to make a brand become known for what it’s great at. People will always know and remember you for the things you teach them to do/act on or for a certain value that only you can provide.

The best thing about this practice is that it taps a lot of significant areas of marketing, wherein this approach can allow a site to improve its online branding, link building/attraction, reach in social media as well as in converting visitors to customers/brand followers, given that there’s a reason for them to be interested and to take action – and that is your content.

However, creating great content is not enough, particularly these days, where everyone – in almost any industry – is already implementing content-centric campaigns, making it more of a battle of how to push content and reach its target audience. That ability is the key to a successful content marketing campaign.
First off, there are several types of content that you can choose to create and promote. Blueglass did an article that defines each of these content formats:

• Lists
• Images/Photos
• Articles
• Infographics
• Interactive Infographics
• Videos
• Video Infographics
• Kinetic Typography
• Cinemagraphs
• Graphs
• Quizzes
• Podcasts

In content creation, it’s important to optimize it for search, by using the keywords that you’re aiming to be searched for by people and by shaping an intent to satisfy its target audience, as it scales the opportunities of the content to achieve far greater links in the future (seeing that it can generate constant traffic through search, and can possibly generate more social shares and links).
Need more reasons to believe that it’s really time to invest on this marketing tactic? Here’s an infographic from Blueglass:

Created by BlueGlass Interactive

Now, once you have a great content done, published and ready to be promoted, you can then start using several methods that I’ll be sharing below to efficiently market, garner links to it and have it rank on search engines.

Linker Outreach

Linker outreach is a social marketing and link acquisition method that initially starts from extracting link as well as social data from web contents that are similar to the content that you’ve just launched, and reaching out to them to basically check out your content, since the likelihood of them sharing your content will be higher, as based from their interests/social activity.

There are many tools that you can use to track social shares such as Topsy, Delicious and through manual Google search (using advanced queries to track social accounts/shares on Google+, Facebook and Stumbleupon). Here are some of the basic steps of implementing a linker outreach campaign:

• Find highly shared content in your industry (have lots of social shares such as tweets, Facebook shares, Google +1s, stumbles, etc…).
• Reverse engineer these social shares by using tools such as Topsy and/or Google search.
• Make a list of influential people (particularly those who have blogs/websites), which also should include their contact details (you have to manually check their websites to find contact information) and put them down in an excel sheet.
• Craft an email template that should only be consisted of the following – where you have found there profile, that they have shared your “competitor’s content”, and that they should check out your content too (as they may also find it useful). Pro tip: Don’t ask them to share your content, since they are linkers, and they already know what to do next after seeing your content.

Related Discussions

Discussions on the web is one of the best source of links, as along the process of building conversations that could lead to relationships, you are also able to promote your content (and your brand as an authority) when sharing your information to people who are actually seeking for it.

There are a lot of forms of discussions that you can participate to on the web such as from forum threads, Q&A sites (like Quora) as well as blogs that pertain to the subject of your content (or the problem in which your content provides a solution).

Leaving a useful comment/contribution to the discussion and referencing to your content for a more comprehensive resource can increase the CTR of your links, which is actually good, since people are finding your link useful.

Leverage Social Sharing

Social sharing is definitely the new link building (or simply a new way for search engines to measure web popularity). Once you have a great content set out for your audience to see, and you have started promoting it, it’s important that you maximize the content’s incoming traffic by making your social buttons very visible.

You can easily entice your visitors to share your content if you have a very compelling title for your content, and have your social buttons as a call to action placed above the fold.

It’s also best to add these social buttons at the end of your content, as there are times that readers tend to forget to share the content after reading the entire entry. So placing it below can put more traction to your social marketing strategy.

If you have a strong and of high value content, it’s easier to get social shares. And given that you’ll be generating a lot of social signals, you are then able to increase its chances of getting higher search rankings (for the keyword it is targeting).

Keep on increasing the amount of the content’s social shares by pushing your efforts to bring visitors to that page, as it eventually builds social proof, which can make your future attempts for link requests easier (since they’ll see that the content was heavily shared via social media).

Build Links through Content Distribution

You can also promote your exclusive content through the content you externally distribute such as guest blogs, slide presentations, press releases, ebooks and/or newsletters.

Make the link perceptible to your external content’s readers by making the strings of text longer and descriptive (like 4 – 6 words describing your content and using partial match anchor texts for it to pass through weight in terms of search rankings), as this format for links have higher chances of getting clicked. The position of the link is also vital, placing it on the anywhere on the first 3 paragraphs can help improve its CTR.

Reach out to people who’ve already linked to you

One of the most efficient (and perhaps the easiest) ways to promote a great content is to reach out to those who already know the value of your works. Of course, those would be the ones who have already linked out or socially shared your content in the past.

You can use Opensiteexplorer.org to track top domains linking to you, and list them all out. Segment your list by categorizing blogs/sites in priority-levels, so you can create different email copies for each level (depending on the difficulty of getting a link/share from them – usually based on the stature/authority of their websites).

Once your list is sorted out, you can start contacting them and let them know about your great piece that could be useful to them or their followers.

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3. Building Links Through Adwords

The growth of inbound marketing and recent Google changes have lead to a lot of changes for SEO over the past year. When people like Rand Fishkin start to use the word “inbound marketing” over “SEO” when describing their work, it does seem like the role of SEO is rapidly changing. The expectations of what a traditional SEO campaign should entail may also change. So just why is inbound marketing starting to become so popular within the SEO community?

Traditional SEO Campign

Only 52% of Google users click on an organic search result found on page one – SlingShot SEO

Most traditional SEO campaigns consist of the following key items:

- Keyword Research / Mapping

- On-Page Optimisation (of content)

- Internal Links

- SEO Site Architecture

- Competitor Analysis

- Link Building

- and Content Strategy ?

Content strategy was often an afterthought. The priority is/was, rank 1st for high volume keywords as these equal traffic. But what if the CTR of organic listings was beginning to drop as a result of Google’s constant meddling with the search results. In this report from SlingShot SEO back in October 2011, they reported organic CTR’s were tumbling, with “Only 52% of Google users click on an organic search result found on page one”. Although those figures cannot be verified, the data pool they used was quite low and it was for a particular market segment, I have personally noticed organic keywords driving less volume to sites, even though their organic position has increased.

How Inbound Marketing can help you grow really fast

The role of an SEO is continually expanding, the traditional SEO strategy above is starting to look a lot different in 2012. Inbound Marketing is about driving permission based traffic from a multitude of sources (image credit from this SEOMoz post):

The big shift being towards content marketing. Great content is at the center of your inbound marketing strategy. If you don’t have this, your destined to fail. But for companies who get it right, they are able to grow at rapid pace. For example:

1) SocialMediaExaminer.com: I was lucky enough to interview Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com, for Salesforce’s new #SocialSuccess site (full interview to be live next week). In that interview he shared some of his growth stats including being in the top six marketing blogs in Ad Age and one of the top two small business blogs on Technorati, along with an email list of 125,000 and Facebook group of 72,000. All of this in just over 2 years. In that interview Mike said

“So, the model that we used was really all about giving super-valuable content that we knew people would want to share via social channels”

It’s obviously not that simple, in the interview Mike goes into the different tactics he used to build Social Media Examiner into such a success, but valuable content is at the heart of a great inbound marketing strategy. I highly recommend Mike’s book Launch, it’s jam packed full of really actionable content to help grow your business.

 
2) Marketo: Marketo were named silicon valleys fastest growing private company last year and are the second fastest growing SaaS company of all time. They are a marketing automation company (or Revenue Performance Management), but are another great example of company putting content at the heart of their strategy. I was lucky to speak with Maria Pergolino (their director of Inbound Marketing) on inbound marketing and content strategy prior to the launch of SocialSuccess. They really know how to do great content marketing. I recommend following her on twitter.

Of course Hubspot are the classic example of inbound marketing at work, but there are a multitude of companies putting these tactics to work in order to scale both their organic visits and business fast.

What’s helping to drive the popularity of Inbound Marketing?

There have been a number of developments over the past year that has helped inbound marketing seem like an attractive option for companies, over and above a traditional SEO strategy.

1. Google Panda – Feb 2011

We have all heard the horror stories of the Google Panda update. Since the original update there have been a number of subsequent updates all aimed at sites with poor content.

2. Google Caffeine / Freshness Update

Both the Google Caffeine update and the Google Freshness update would point towards a consistent content strategy being a good tactic to adopt. Please note, this doesn’t mean “Google Loves Fresh Content”, please remove that from your thinking. For more information on that, see “Keep in Mind“.

3. Bad Link Practices

Last year saw two very public penalties for sites using questionable link practices, both J.C Penny and OverStock suffered the wrath of Google. The tide may begin to turn against anchor text driven strategies and big companies may also feel a lot more at ease with a quality content strategy over a merky link strategy.

4. Google & Bing use Social Signals

In late 2010 Google & Bing signaled they were using social signals to help rank pages. As to what degree is still not clear, however it points towards highly shareable content being useful for both social and search traffic.

5. Google + Launch and Search Plus Your Work

Of course Google + was launched last year as Google stepped up’s it’s attempts to take on Facebook and Twitter in the battle of the social networks. Since then they have been constantly adding new features. The biggest of these being Search Plus Your World. The search results pages have and are changing drastically, it would seem we need to start thinking of how we can create content that solves problems or entertains so we can ensure our site is surfaced front of users.

These changes are all helping to propel a shift in how we construct SEO strategies, but …..

… Keep in Mind

There is NOTHING wrong with link strategies that are focused on driving target anchor text to your site

- Google doesn’t love “fresh” content. It loves quality content and fresh content if relevant for certain search queries. I am sick of hearing the constant mantra of “Google loves fresh content”. If your quality sucks, then having fresh content just means you suck more often.

- There is NOTHING wrong with link strategies that are focused on driving target anchor text to your site. In fact, this is still needed and in some markets is the core part of your overall strategy. Not every set of tactics will work for each market.

- Building a content strategy takes time and resources. It’s an investment and that content also needs to be promoted. Thinking through your strategy prior to content development will save you a lot of problems in the long run.

Do you feel SEO will just become part of an all round inbound marketing role? Would love to hear from you below.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Inbound Marketing – A Happy Home for Some SEO’s ?
2. 4 Tips for Improving your Paid Advertising with a great Inbound Marketing Strategy
3. 5 Best Resources to get Started with Inbound Marketing